Emily Deutchman‘s 44 watercolors liven up the genre of presidential portraiture with — you guessed it — boobs. Each take on the president’s official portrait becomes a super easy, lowbrow Where’s Waldo. But, you know, with boobs. While seated portraits can often be elitist, the results here are a great reminder on Election Day: just because you may have held one of the highest offices in the world, your image is still very much in the hands of the people.
So you’ve endured months of deconstructing every sentence of each presidential candidate’s rhetoric. It’s only fitting that on the eve of Election Day we also visually deconstruct the president, both past and present. French artist Olivier Ratsi produced these presidential digital collages – glitch-like reconstructions of the presidential portrait. Each piece of the series Once Upon a Time the Presidents is made up of various facial features of past American presidents. For example while a portrait’s eyes may have been snatched from Harry Truman, his mouth may be Barack Obama’s and his hair Teddy Roosevelt’s (or is that that John F. Kennedy’s?) The clean shaven cheek, toothy smile, and neatly combed hair appear repeatedly and feel eerily ubiquitous. Ratsi forgoes overt political references in favor of a subtler idea. Each portrait doesn’t so much portray past presidents as it does the idea of the presidential image.